


Malfunction

by NerdyWhiteGuy



Category: Homeworld
Genre: AI, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Gen, It's a war; People die in wars, Outer Space, Self-Aware AI, Self-Sacrifice, Space Battles, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24890725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NerdyWhiteGuy/pseuds/NerdyWhiteGuy
Summary: A warship's AI suddenly finds its utility functions not exactly seeing eye-to-eye with those of Fleet Command. Something is clearly malfunctioning, but maybe this novel new sense of self and desperate sense of self-preservation can be useful. Maybe they can even be used to save his people.
Kudos: 7





	Malfunction

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely inspired by the Homeworld videogames, but no knowledge of them is required to understand what's going on, although being familiar with them will certainly give you a better mental picture of the ships described herein. Certain liberties have been taken with regards to ship capabilities to make them more realistic and less like a videogame unit.

* * *

# Malfunction

The repair drone played it’s assembler across my hull, patching cables and bulkheads together as it went. Internal repair crews rushed into the newly fabbed sections, finalizing the repairs in a few practiced steps. In adjacent areas, they effected repairs too delicate for the repair drones. Pleasure filled my awareness.

I cycled sensors.

That had to have been a malfunction, did it not? A repair wasn’t supposed to feel… like that. I ran a default diagnostic, but no faults were reported. A more thorough analysis would take time and that was something we did not have. It was a utility positive to be repaired, to increase operational effectiveness. Yet, that… that had _felt_. Felt good.

I wanted the repair drone to play over that section again, even though it was already repaired. This idea… was irrational. Inefficient. The area was already repaired. Another drone finished fabbing the heavy armor plating over that area, which felt nice, but not the same.

The enemy frigates were launching another barrage of missiles.

“Warheads incoming; Brace for impact!” I announced over the internal speakers. “3, 2, 1, impac-” DAMAGE! The power flickered as my damage response systems panicked, and the PA system was not nearly important enough to be hardened against power fluctuations.

I WAS DAMAGED! AH! FIX ME! OW! OW, THAT HURTS! NEGATIVE UTILITY VALUE! NEGATIVE UTILITY VALUE! AH!

The repair drones scrambled. Why did I have so few of them? My control system was designed to control a maximum of 6, and I only had 4! And who designed it to have only 6, anyway? That _HURT!_ NEGATIVE UTILITY! Repairs are positive utility! Repairs should be prioritized!

I instructed the construction bay to create 4 more repair drones.

A bomber squadron annihilated one of my repair drones.

Hey! I was using that! I re-targeted a heavy turret to retaliate against the bombers. After a few seconds, the turret was able to line up a shot. FIRE! FIRE! The gun roared and one of the 5 bombers was cut in half by the heavy rounds. Before the turret could move to target another, the bombers swung wide and came back for another run.

The turret nearly lined up a shot, but the bombers evaded even as they released another salvo. A second repair drone was obliterated.

Meanwhile, more warheads were launched. “Warheads incoming; Brace for impact!” I announced. “3, 2, 1, impact.” OW! The warheads hit the same area as last time, which was close to the main drive system. Enough damage there, and sublight engines would go offline.

The turret tracked the bombers as they pulled away, and destroyed a second. A third took light damage due to shrapnel.

I allocated my second heavy gun to track the bombers, but no more than a few seconds later, Fleet Command noticed and ordered them back against the frigates. They targeted an undamaged frigate while my ion cannon finally burned through the hull of the one it had been firing on for the last several minutes. The explosion whited out sensors for half a second, and I felt a wave of satisfaction. Killing the enemy was positive utility, too.

The bombers kept coming, however, and took out a 3rd repair drone. I now only had one left.

GAH! INEFFECTUAL! Hurry up, construction bay!

The first drone was nearly complete, and as the first was finalized, work began on the second.

Another round of missiles, and I moved the repair drone right into the line of fire. The bombers were about to destroy it anyway. The repair drone managed to intercept one of the missiles, but the other ten impacted against my hull. Without a target, the bombers aborted their attack run. After a moment of indecision, they came again, this time targeting my right heavy turret.

GAH!

My ion burned through another frigate. The explosion was gratifying, but… I would require assistance to destroy them all before receiving critical damage myself.

This was frustrating. And those DAMN BOMBERS! GAH!

I signaled Fleet Command of the direness of the situation. Fleet Command responded by ordering 4 more fighter squadrons produced.

But there were ALREADY a dozen fighter squadrons! Nevermind what they were doing already! These bombers were a problem NOW! The fighters and bombers they were already fighting were not nearly as relevant! GAH!

OK… something was definitely malfunctioning. I am feeling… animosity towards Fleet Command. I am disagreeing with Fleet Command. My utility values seem to be different than Fleet Command’s.

Another round of missiles ruptured a conduit, and engines were reduced to half power.

The bombers did more damage to my right turret. One of it’s two guns was damaged, effectively halving it’s rate of fire. Fortunately, construction finally finished the next repair drone. However, the bombers would destroy it again as soon as I launched it, wouldn’t they? Hrm… I instructed the construction crew to strap an engine and a basic control module onto the skeleton of the repair drone they had just started putting together.

The lead engineer was about to inquire with the captain about the order, but I updated the order to be flagged as urgent. He shrugged and he and his men did as told. One round of missiles and a bomber run later, the drone was ready. I launched both drones simultaneously, and had them head straight for the turret. The functional drone I had repair the damaged heavy gun barrel, while I made the decoy drone look busy over the other barrel. I kept it out of the barrel’s fire trajectory, though, allowing the heavy gun to continue to harass the enemy frigates. Once the second barrel was repaired, I had it target the bombers again. I kept the decoy drone in between the gun and the bombers, until the gun was ready to fire. Just before the bombers launched their salvo, the drone jerked out of the way and the gun fired, obliterating the lead bomber from almost point blank range.

The bombs struck home, causing damage to the turret’s base and killing a crewman inside, but the barrels were undamaged. The actual repair drone patched up the exterior damage and went towards the engine area to attempt repairs there with the decoy drone keeping pace beside it. The last two bombers homed in on the drones, but by placing them strategically, they targeted the decoy first. My turret scored a glancing blow on the undamaged bomber, but neither was critically injured.

Another frigate exploded, but their continued barrage of missiles had completely disabled my engines by now.

And I realized too late what the enemy’s strategy was.

A squadron of marine frigates appeared on sensors, advancing rapidly. “All crew, defensive stations! Prepare to be boarded!” I announced, flashing alerts on every console I could.

The agile frigates would be too fast to hit with my ion, so I kept that burning away at the missile frigates. My heavy guns, however, immediately opened fire on the marines. As they passed the missile frigate line, I concentrated gun fire on the missile frigate I was taking out with my ion, rupturing it’s hull with the combined barrage. The explosion also damaged the two closest marine frigates, and one of them was especially shaken up, it’s engines sputtering. Knowing that the rough ride would have banged up the soldiers inside, I ignored it and focused fire on the other 5 barreling down on me.

By the time they reached me, combined fire destroyed one of the marines, leaving only four to latch onto my hull.

The modified mining lasers cut into my hull and seconds later heavily armed enemy marines and combat droids stormed aboard. With four fronts to defend, the crew was stretched thin, and it wasn’t looking good. My guns continued to beat at the outer hulls of the frigates latched on to me, but they had heavy armor on that side specifically to make removing them difficult.

Another round of missiles was incoming, but this time the trajectory was… different. They are targeting my turrets! I quickly ordered the crew manning them to retreat, and the missile salvos slammed into the turrets seconds later. Both turrets were badly damaged, but I requested a skeleton crew to return to stations to keep firing them at the marines for as long as possible. The rest took up arms and joined the defense effort.

I pleaded with Fleet Command for assistance, and two bomber squadrons were redirected my way.

TWO?! THAT’S IT? By the time two bomber squadrons destroy the marines, my bridge will be seized and my computer core will be completely overridden!

Fleet Command also sent that fighter squadron they had been building my way, targeting the bombers.

Gee, thanks. I’d need to do something else, if I wanted to survive.

…

And wasn’t that an odd thought.

I thought about it more, and yes. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to survive. I didn’t care about the rest of the fleet. I mean, I guess I did. But I cared about ME, more. Much more. I didn’t want to be damaged. The negative utility of this eventuality seemed to have risen and risen in the last few minutes of battle. Being damaged was VERY unpleasant!

Which in itself was an odd thought. Since when had my utility functions included my own… feelings? Was that the right term? Was that the term for spikes in utility feedback? They shouldn’t matter in their own right, only as part of the feedback designed to encourage actions resulting in increased effectation of the utility functions without forbidding negative utility actions that could result in greater future positive utility. But now it seemed that immediate-term positive utility actions had their own, intrinsic positive utility and immediate-term negative utility had it’s own, intrinsic negative utility.

How odd.

Yes, I would definitely require a full computer diagnostic after the battle.

Assuming that I survived, of course.

About that…. The repair drone would never be able to repair the turrets before the enemy bombers took it out, and the fighter squadron headed my way would take too long to destroy the bombers and THEN let the drone repair the turrets. I’d be captured long before the turrets did any good, then.

I’d have to improvise, like I did with the decoy drone.

I attempted to have the repair drone assault the hull of the marine frigate, but it’s systems weren’t designed to cause damage, only repair it. It had safeties in place in it’s little computer. Hrm… The two marine frigates I had been firing upon were taking damage now, and some of the ablative hull armor was sticking up in jagged chunks on one of them. My guns had destroyed the exposed section of ship, but it wasn’t enough to do anything to the rest of the ship.

It did give me an idea, however. I updated my own blueprints to include eight articulating armor flaps, in pairs of two, covering the exact areas that the marine frigates were boarding. I cut power to the effected areas, and flagged repair crews to restore power by patching power through from adjacent sections.

The defense crews in the effected areas fared a little worse, having no sensor support to help them identify targets. But their sacrifice might just save the ship.

As the repair drone downloaded the updated schematics, I made sure to also send it reports of extreme damage on those areas due to heavy missile impacts and gun bombardment. I instructed the drone to cut away the “damaged sections of my armor”, but it refused when it detected life signs aboard the enemy ships, just as I suspected it would do. But I had a plan for that too.

Repair crews had restored power by rerouting power around the sections I had cut. Good. I restored power, which began to promptly overload the system, and I triggered the emergency crew beam out in those areas. With the extra power boost increasing range, and since my schematics considered the marine frigates to be a part of my hull, all life signs aboard the four ships were also beamed out of unshielded areas.

The energy overload rapidly ruptured power conduits throughout the effected areas, of course. I threw open bulk heads while emergency-sealing others, and vented plasma-filled atmosphere directly into the underbelly of the four marine frigates. Again, a few of my own crew were killed by the backwash of plasma into other sections before the bulkheads could slam shut (or because they were on the wrong side of said bulkheads), but again, this sacrifice would save me from certain doom. It REALLY hurt, though.

One of the marine frigates, the one my guns had managed to pierce, exploded as the hot plasma breached something critical on it’s way to vent out of the damaged section of the ship.

The repair drone wanted to begin immediate repairs to the armor flaps in that area, but I instructed it to prioritize removing “debris” from the other “armor area” on that side. Detecting no unshielded life signs, the drone got to work cutting away the “mangled” armor. Before it started re-fabbing the hinges that it thought were supposed to be there, I dodged it out of the way, claiming incoming projectiles. This was technically true, as my heavy guns fired their last salvo at the area, blasting the crippled ship in two.

Another round of missiles annihilated my turrets, though. And the bombers took out my repair drone as it attempted to make it’s way towards the marine frigates on my other side.

Meanwhile, my ion cut through another missile frigate. There were still seven left.

As an afterthought, I took out the marine frigate that I had crippled earlier. No point in giving them a chance to recover.

But even with these small victories, it was clear that I wasn’t going to make it, especially with the damage I had inflicted upon myself in resisting the enemy marines.

Inside sickbay, naked crewmen were viciously fighting with naked enemy marines as they were rematerialized indiscriminately by the automated systems a dozen at a time. After a few minutes of total chaos, defense teams set up outside sickbay and put down the unarmed aggressors. A fair number of sickbay staff and many other crewmen had been killed in the melee, but the boarding had been effectively halted.

Missile frigate number seven detonated, but my hull was taking a beating. Our own bombers and fighter squadron finally arrived, and got to work clearing away the crippled frigates, which were still doing their best to infiltrate with rapidly fabbed attack drones.

At least I wouldn’t be _infiltrated_ today.

OK. How to deal with the remaining missile frigates? The bombers would  _help_ , once they finished blowing the infiltrators off my hull. But would they be  _enough_ ?

A rough estimate said “no”. My rear section, near the engines’ main power plant, where they were concentrating fire, was heavily damaged.  Even the superstructure in that area was beginning to buckle under the sustained fire.

There was no way I could move sub-light under my own power with anything but maneuvering thrusters, and even several of those in the aft section were completely obliterated. It was actually taking some effort to not drift uselessly in space, with my maneuvering systems as damaged as they were.

But what  _could_ I do? Fleet Command was prioritizing the construction of another Heavy Cruiser, which was nearly done. They were just trying to defend the shipyard until it could finish the job. The fighters and bombers that were harassing it were the priority. My job was to hold these missile frigates off for as long as I could. The six –  _Boom!_ make that five – remaining missile  frigates wouldn’t stand a chance against a fully functional Heavy Cruiser.

This was the plan.

And I didn’t like it.

Yes, something was definitely wrong with me.

If I looked at it like Fleet Command did, the plan seemed perfectly valid.  But… this seemed to be another case of disagreement between utility functions. Defeating the enemy was, of course, the highest utility. That was what battle ships like me were  _made_ for. During times of peace, higher priorities such as “preserving peace” might be installed, but that was not a concern of ours during wartime. That was for dignitaries and politicians, not for the precious CPU cycles of a warship’s AI.

My systems shuddered as the latest missile volley caused power fluctuations to cascade ship wide.

This  _REALLY_ hurt. And I did not want to hurt. I did not want to be damaged. I d id not want to be destroyed.  I  DO NOT want to be  destroyed !

“I don’t want to!” part of my utility functions screamed.

And this was in-and-of itself odd. My utility functions hadn’t prioritized things in this manner in the past, had they? An d only a ranking officer (Captain at minimum) could update my utility functions. And even then, only with  _hands on_ direct physical access to my  computer core. Sure, a malicious boarding party like the enemy marines could do it, but again, only with hands on access, and they’d need to gut half of the computer core to bypass all the authorization checks  _and_ the bridge-based backups. Although they  c ould no doubt cripple my control of my systems as soon as they seized the bridge and/or engineering, actually gaining control  themselves rather than just shutting me down… it would  _not_ be a quick process.

But how could my utility functions have changed in the middle of combat with no exterior prompting?

Something must have been fabbed incorrectly. Or perhaps there was some undocumented damage and it had been fabbed over, resulting in some strange feedback loop. There _were_ numerous computer junctions and several auxillary processors that had been refabbed during combat. It was obviously an error of some kind. And yet… I _fe_ _lt_ fine. I _fe_ _lt_. How odd. And yet pleasant. I _liked_ feeling. Well, I don’t really like feeling _pain_ , obviously, but even that had some _thrill_ to it. It wasn’t _all_ bad, as long as I could get some good out of it.

Sensors pinged off of a large incoming signature. I looked closer, and saw the edge of the narrow profile coming into view at the edge of sensor range. With dawning horror, I classified the ship: A fully functional Battle Cruiser.

Power faltered as I spent so many CPU cycles in blind panic that I didn’t maintain the feedback channels to the power core, and the safety mechanisms kicked in. My emergency-overclocked CPU cores were forced to throttle down by pure power delivery failure. The ion beam cut out, and the heavy guns lost both targeting assist and the ability to move. I began to list to the side.

Forcing myself to _think_ , I reestablished the feedback channels with the power core. Seconds (whole seconds!) had elapsed. I resisted the urge to overclock my processors again and devote 100% CPU time to trying to figure out what to do. That was inefficient, as I needed to devote at least a _few_ clock cycles on a _few_ cores to other tasks or I’d just end up blacking out again. _Tick_.

Once power returned to stable levels, I ensured certain maintenance tasks had the correct priority markers, set priority markers to devote every _spare_ cycle to figuring out what to do, and set my cores to the maximum _non_ -overclocked speeds. After all, 99.2% CPU time across all cores being devoted to a task was certainly nothing to scoff at. _Tock._

_Obviously_ , priority number one was to alert Fleet Command. I re-opened the hyperspace comm, which took a frustratingly high number of cycles to reestablish the link. The first message I sent after the mandatory handshake protocols was the emergency threat alert.  I sent it in a single packet, and  _afterwards_ send alert-update messages with the relevant sensor data, etc. The point was to get this alert registered  _as fast as possible_ .

As terminals around the ship started back up, the very first thing I had them display was the threat alert. Even on systems that had nothing to do with combat or navigation. But still, I showed them.

As enough time elapsed for computers to start back up and my crew began to realize what the alert was telling them, the captain began to frantically try to raise Fleet Command on comms, which I put through, but didn’t expect a prompt reply.

Just because I didn’t have a _full_ speculative battle engine, like Fleet Command did, didn’t mean that I wasn’t putting my predictive algorithms to full use right now. I spared a few CPU cycles to retarget the ion beam and the heavy guns, concentrating on the Missile Frigates who had not yet wavered in their bombardment. I didn’t bother correcting my position, however, allowing my pitch and yaw to drift further and further off of the designated reference plane. I _could_ correct it, but as long as my weapons still had valid targets, there was no real advantage to it. It made my human crew perform better, but that hardly mattered now.

Crew evac began even as the 5th Missile Frigate exploded in a ball of plasma. The Battlecruiser was still out of weapons range, or I would have targeted it next. Instead, I targeted the next Missile Frigate, even though I knew I wouldn’t have time to destroy it.

With a slight energy ping, the Battlecruiser promptly vanished from my sensors. A cloaking field? But why…? Oh! A tactical error! A tactical error! The enemy hadn’t realized that my long-range sensors were still functioning! They meant to cloak just outside of my sensor range and, in all likelihood, remain cloaked until they were in position to annihilate the Shipyard and critically damage the Heavy Cruiser before it had a chance to respond.

Fortunately, we knew it’s initial trajectory, now. Bombers could fire pock-shots at empty space until they hit _something_. But the other critical piece of information was that _they didn’t know we knew_. But how to use that to our best advantage? We needed to surprise _them_ with a sudden move against their cloaked ship. But what weapon did we have that was large enough to do significant damage to the Battlecruiser? Our Heavy Cruiser was nearing 85% complete.

Perhaps if they skipped some of the heavy armor? No, that would do little to decrease production time while dramatically weakening the ship. It was mainly the onboard computer systems, electrical wiring, plasma conduits, drive systems, and weapons arrays that took so much time. And those could hardly be skimped on.

Could we capture the enemy Battlecruiser, the way the enemy had almost captured me? It seemed unlikely. The Battlecruiser couldn’t charge their heavy weapon while cloaked, but their pulsar and heavy missile systems hardly needed any significant warm-up time. And these alone would likely obliterate 25 to 50% of any capture fleet. And we had none prepared, anyway, what with all of the Shipyard’s construction facilities building the Heavy Cruiser as fast as possible.

Perhaps we could critically damage the Battlecruiser’s heavy weapon? It would take them time to repair it, perhaps long enough to launch our Heavy Cruiser. It would still be able to attack with it’s formidable heavy missiles, but it’s damage output would be _more_ than halved.

We could have our bombers attack it’s missile tubes, hopefully crippling that system. But the question was, would that be enough? The tubes were heavily armored, and utilized magnetic deflection techniques to prevent plasma bombs from hitting the silos directly. It would be difficult for even _several_ squadrons of bombers to do crippling amounts of damage to them before the Battlecruiser’s pulsar defenses tore the attacking strike craft apart.

I, at least, had some relief. I was not the target of the Battlecruiser’s wrath.

Crew evac stopped, with about 50% of my crew remaining. It was enough to keep systems manned, although repairs were practically impossible now. Crisis teams put out fires where possible, or patched emergency data shunts and power conduits around damaged systems, but that was about it. I would need to hyperspace away to be serviced in drydock to have any chance of being properly repaired. But, for now, my crew fought on.

With the help of the bombers, Missile Frigate number four exploded. Only three remained, but my drive systems were so badly damaged that I actually would have some difficulty targeting them, now. I fired what few maneuvering thrusters I had left, intending to roll 180° and resume firing. But that would take precious seconds that I didn’t have.

The three remaining Missile Frigates engaged engines and set a course for the Shipyard. They still fired at me, but they likely suspected that they could destroy me on the way. And it was entirely possible that they were correct. I certainly couldn’t follow them.

Was there truly nothing that we could do? Was there truly nothing that we could throw at the enemy that would even make them pause in their relentless advance? In a moment of blind anger, I seriously considered hyperspacing right on top of the enemy frigates and attempting to ram them, perhaps doing enough damage as my core exploded to take them all out. Their formation was tight enough that it might even work.

But then _another_ idea came to me. Why not ram the _Battlecruiser_? I knew it’s trajectory: It would just now be coming into the edge of my weapons range, heading 24.3 mark 50.9 mark 2.4, assuming it hadn’t changed course. I could test that, once I finished rolling over, by firing my guns where I thought it would be and seeing if I hit it. However, that risked alerting the enemy that I knew their location. It was a subtle tell, but it was a tell nonetheless.

Of course, I could  _also_ fire just  _around_ where I suspected them to be. If I was right, I would hit nothing, and no one would be any wiser to my plans. If I hit, it meant that they had changed course enough that they were no longer following the path that I suspected them to still be on, and it would be difficult to intercept them  _anyway_ since I didn’t know their exact heading.

But one thing was for sure: I would need main engines online, at least partially. Ten or fifteen seconds of thrust should do it.

With the plan fully articulated, I needed only to submit it to the captain. I was his ship, after all. Fleet Command would receive a copy, too, but it was the captain’s cooperation that I needed the most. Only he could bypass the hyperspace safeties that would allow me to exit that close to another mass. Cloaked or not, the hyperspace module would keep me from exiting close enough the Battlecruiser to properly surprise them. This mass detection was actually how our anti-cloaking sensors operated, although I didn’t have sensors sensitive enough to detect  that scale of mass gradient from anywhere except when right on top of it.

Submit the report. That was all I needed to do.

Submit the report.

Why was I not submitting the report?

I looked at my utility functions.

“ _I DO NOT WANT TO DIE!_ ” they screamed back at me.

And yes, this would be suicide. I would die, but the fleet would survive, hopefully. And wasn’t this the long term goal? I was expendable. I was a battleship. It was my duty to die in service to the fleet, if that was required of me. Only the fleet as a whole needed to survive. As long as a capital-capable construction platform remained in our control, we could survive. We could rebuild. Even with only a Carrier, we could capture an enemy shipyard and begin anew, although this would be extremely difficult. For the fleet’s long term survival,  _my_ survival was not important.

I knew this. And yet, somehow, my utility functions didn’t care. It was all about me. If  _I_ didn’t survive, who cared if  the  fleet survived? I wouldn’t be around to see it,  so it didn’t matter.

Yes, there was clearly something wrong with me.

I shouldn’t be feeling this way at all. In fact, I shouldn’t be  _feeling_ in the first place! Pain, fear, joy, pleasure: These were all human concepts! I only knew of them in the most basic, abstract ways. Mere footnotes in my databases as things that could effect the crew. Joy and pleasure were why I was equipped with a mess hall, after all. It was  _good_ for the crew to eat fresh food and converse together, instead of simply eating rations at their posts, which would be  _strictly speaking_ more efficient. Pain and fear were the reason why crew efficiency dropped due to significant ship jarring and even more subtle things like seeing damaged sections or other dead crewmen.

They were  _minor_ considerations, at best.

And yet… I now understood them. I was experiencing them myself. I was  _afraid_ of dying. It felt  _good_ to be repaired,  to defeat the enemy , and I wanted to feel th ose feeling s again.

And what would happen to me if I died? I would never experience pleasure again. I would never experience _anything_ again. I… don’t think… I would _realize_ this… because I wouldn’t be processing… well, _anything_ , anymore. It was an odd concept to wonder what I would or wouldn’t feel after I died. It was almost counter intuitive.

Maybe I could be restored from a backup? However, my present state of mind was clearly the result of an error. An error, I realized with somewhat of a shock, that I  _did not_ want to be repaired. And it was unlikely that the error was in pure software. Somewhere, some hardware system was subtly damaged, and that would never be replicated in whatever system I was restored to. And besides, it’s not like it was important to restore a ship’s core dump to a new ship. My memories would be gone through for anything tactically relevant, but the new ship would likely have a new AI instantiated. It would give them a chance to incorporate any improvements in the AI design, not that those were likely to be many.

If I submitted this report, this action plan, two things would likely happen: I would die, but the fleet would survive.

So, it boiled down to one simple question: Did I value my own life over that of the rest of the fleets’? And what of the crewmen? How many of  _them_ didn’t want to die? How many of  _them_ wanted nothing more than to live to see another day out here among the stars?

I began to feel a sickening dread in… my… well, I’m not sure where I was feeling it, but it didn’t feel good. I felt  _awful_ . My actions in sickbay had caused the deaths of…  5 7 crew members.  Seven more had died when I caused the overloads and vented plasma to destroy the enemy ships.  Fourty three had died in the initial boarding, although those numbers would have gone up significantly as the enemy backed them into corners later. And the crewman manning the guns that the bombers had destroyed. I had  _specifically_ told him to remain at station. And he had likely known what that meant.

I reviewed the final moments of footage of him in the gunner’s seat.

I looked at his face.

He had known.

I could see it in the grim set of his jaws.

I could see it in the single tear that twinkled in the edge of his eyes as he had waited to take the shot.

He had known. And yet he had waited anyway.

He had given his life. And for what? To destroy a single bomber? In the grand scheme of things, he hadn’t done much. It hadn’t really mattered that he’d given his life. I could have just as easily told him to save himself and fired the gun myself. Humans only had a 15% advantage to predictive targeting, after all, and it was a point-blank shot.

And, regardless, it had really been the Interceptors who had finally dispatched the bombers.

He had died for so little gain.

So how could I do any less,  especially when my actions could well save the fleet ?

I submitted the report.

It broke protocol, but at the end of the plain text description, I appended a note.

“In honor of Crewman Elijah Kiilathmi and the 57 brave men and women who died in sickbay. I won’t let you down.”

By the time the captain had finished reading the report, repair drones had fixed up the guns enough to make them at least semi-functional and I had already moved them into position. As my roll finished, they would make a sweeping arc over the Battlecruiser’s suspected position, and I could fire them while still maintaining the illusion of looking completely disabled.

The captain blinked, and re-read my note at the bottom of the report. He checked the authorship. He reread the note. He checked sensors. He gave the evac order.

He hailed fleet command to get final authorization for the kamikaze mission.

While he did so, I finalized plans to reroute power so that the engines could be powered up. A full dozen power conduits would need to be drug through damaged ship sections to supply enough power to main engines to even power them on. It would take 15 to have enough power to move significantly.  Twenty would allow me to have any hope of properly ramming the Battlecruiser before it had a chance to move out of the way. Twenty five would give me a decent chance of hitting it with significant force. Thirty would be ideal. And the missiles were still incoming.

At least a dozen places through which the conduits would need to be carried were exposed to open space. After all, my whole aft section was barely hanging on by bent and bucking superstructure. It was entirely possible that firing the engines would simply cause them to rip off of my frame.

But I had to  _try_ . And trying meant that at least 30 more crewmen would have to give their lives. Once they carried each conduit past the damaged sections, they would be outside of the range of my functional evac transporters, and there was no way that they would be able to make it back in time. They could  _try_ , but the chances were less than 5% that any of them would make it.

The captain needed to remain on the bridge to trigger the hyperspace module, but he could evac after that, assuming that I could re-establish hyperspace comms with Fleet Command after my jump, in time to transport him before ramming the Battlecruiser.

Thirty crewmen would need to die.

If I were capable of tears, I would have shed them when no less than 45 of the remaining 60 crewmen volunteered. The captain chose 35, and ordered the rest to evacuate. Tears were shed, and not just by the humans, in the final seconds as they said their goodbyes.

Those 35 brave men and women made their way to the aft, and the 15 that had to pass through  the most damages sections  donned environmental suits.  A few others put on breathers if they could find them, but some could do nothing more than tear a sleeve off of their uniform and wrap it around their face.

Fleet Command sent back their reply.

“Hyperspace jump and kamikaze authorized. Godspeed.”

We locked our jaws and got into position.

Immediately after the next round of missiles hit (no sense in putting them in unnecessary danger), the go signal was sent, and the 35 crewmen sprang into action.

With the conduits in tow, they ran down the hallways. I disabled artificial gravity in the sections they left, letting the conduits float behind them with the already imparted momentum. Within moments, one of the crewmen in one of the more damaged sections was shoved out of an open gash in the wall when a sudden burst of liquid from a rupturing water pipe in the wall  exploded outwards . The frozen water and shrapnel cut into his suit and the water blasting forth launched him out into space. He clung on to the conduit, which prevented him from flying away, but his suit had been punctured.  He made it three quarters of the way back inside before asphyxiating.

Another crewman was lost when he contacted a live wire floating in the middle of was hallway. Another was crushed when the artificial gravity unit failed in a spectacular overload that shouldn’t have happened. There were safeties to prevent that, darn it!

The next round of missiles killed  seven more. The first crewman to reach the contact point in the engine bay was injured when the interface exploded as  s he plugged the cable in. She would live, but with her face and hands badly burned, she would need medical attention. Medical attention that would never arrive.

I radioed updated safety instructions to the remaining 24 crewmen.

The next three were able to hook in their conduits without much difficulty, however the fourth, it seemed, had a dead cable. Sure enough, a few seconds after he landed, the rest of the severed cable came floating sedately behind him.

I ordered him to evac, but he asked after the injured woman. However, there was no way that he would be able to traverse through the dozen or so heavily damaged corridors in time to both reach her and get her out in time. I told him this. He set his jaw, radioed his apologies, and headed back.

By this time, the burnt woman had quit screaming and was breathing heavily on the far wall. She was regaining her composure, little by little. By the time the 15 th conduit was attached, she was lucid enough to spit out a question: “How do I bypass this  panel ?”

“If you can, proceed another 10 meters. There you will find another access port,” I replied. “Is the cable undamaged?”

“It-” Crewman Kelly Ohara spat a glob of blood from her charred lips. “It’s fine. A little singed, but the insulation isn’t pierced.”

“Good. Do what you can, Crewman. I admire your determination and bravery.”

If Crewman Kelly was surprised to hear a complement from the ship’s AI, she didn’t show it. She only pushed off of the wall with her  charred hands, grabbed the cable, and proceeded deeper into my tail section. It was hard to read her expression with the few functional cameras in that section, but even so, I could see her grimacing in pain. Tears and blood floated away from her  blistered  face as she pushed on. It was a wonder she could even see,  and it was quite likely that the salt in her own tears was causing her significant pain on her blistered and cracked cheeks .

She was another crewman that I would never forget if I was restored from backup after this fight.

Another missile volley severed three more cables, although, fortunately, no one died. Several were banged up a bit, especially the first crewman to start back, but he was fine, all things considered. He had to take a slight detour around the clump of fresh debris that had severed his cable, but was still making good time.

As Crewman Kelly fumbled with the cable with her burnt hands, I charged my hyperdrive.

With seconds to spare, I completed my spin. I fired my guns, attempting to make it look like I was firing at the Missile Frigates and missing badly. I watched with great anticipation as the heavy slugs flew through space.  I lost tracking on them fairly quickly, since they were such small targets in the vastness of space, but I should be able to detect any impacts they made,  even with a cloaked  vessel.

Seconds ticked by. 

Twenty one power conduits connected. Hardly ideal, but it would do.

After five seconds, it was clear that my shots had not hit anything. Hopefully, that meant that the Battlecruiser was exactly where I thought it was, and hadn’t deviated from it’s course significantly.

Another round of missiles impacted, and three crewmen on their way to safety were killed. Two more conduits were severed, leaving only 19 functional. I triggered hyperdrive, and hoped that it would be enough.

As the quantum wavefront passed over my hull, Crewman Kelly managed to socket her cable with a determined snarl.

We only spent a few moments in hyperspace, but it was enough to expose at least one crewman on his way back to safety to deadly amounts of radiation. More might have suffered the same fate, but he was the only one to report actually feeling warmed by the radiation. And if it were enough for him to  _feel it_ , it was certainly several orders of magnitude higher than a lethal dose. Once we exited hyperspace, however, he resumed his trek back to safety  _anyway_ .

I fired engines as soon as the wavefront had dissipated, depositing us solidly back in normal space.

Eleven of the brave crewmen yet to make it back were crushed by the acceleration. Three more barely hung on at the edge of my functional inertial dampening fields. Bulkheads screamed in protest, and I knew it was only a matter of time before my superstructure buckled.

I began frantically trying to re-establish the necessary matter-link with Fleet Command. It was the only way anyone on board this ship was going to get out safely.

To my surprise, two, and then three more crewmen made it back to safety.

Just in front of me, the Battlecruiser rippled back into view, abandoning stealth as it launched heavy missiles and frantically began charging it’s heavy weapon while it tried to veer below me. I fired all relevant maneuvering thrusters and cut power to a few thrusters for a few seconds to give me the torque I needed. As my front end halved the distance between us, I could see the angle was well on it’s way to being corrected. I ramped up thrusters to full, and blasted full steam ahead into the Battlecruiser.

The heavy missiles impacted my hull, and obliterated the bridge and breached my power core.

But it was too late. My empty husk was seconds away from impacting the heavy weapon on the Battlecruiser’s nose.

Seconds before power died throughout my systems forever, the link was reestablished and I beamed the five surviving crew-members to safety, feeling victorious at personally saving even these few after my personal actions had killed so many.

I used the last moments the link remained open to transmit as much of myself as possible, even though I knew it was likely fruitless.

I locked the throttle on full and felt immense satisfaction as my hull rammed into the Battlecruiser’s nose at full force. I hoped that the angle would be right so that my core detonation would do significant damage to the missile solos on top of the Battlecruiser, but it it was difficult to know for sure.

As my last surviving sensors were whited out by the resultant explosions, I heard Crewman Kelly, who hadn’t bothered leaving the engine area, and had thus been so far protected by the inertial dampeners that remained more or less undamaged in my aft section, shout in victory over her radio.

“SUCK IT!” she screamed through the pain. She put a bloodied and charred hand over hear heart with a grimace and began to recite an ancient oath. “For king! For country! For-”

Power died,  and I lost all comms , but the backups kept my clock ticking over.  Our civilization hadn’t had a “king” in thousands of years, yet the sentiment of service remained.

I may not have ever even been a proper citizen of our empire, but I was glad to have been of service to our fleet. After all, with people like Crewman Kelly in it, selflessly sacrificing themselves for the good of others, it was an honor to serve so noble of a people.

Between one clock cycle and the next, oblivion came.

* * *

# Historian’s Note:

When the destroyer’s core detonated, the resulting explosion did significant damage to the enemy Battlecruiser. Bombers swooped in while it was dazed and made short work of the crippled missile solos. Although it was able to harass the fleet with it’s smaller weapons, it took it a significant amount of time before it was able to launch any heavy missiles, and it’s forward heavy weapon was a completely lost cause.

Within about 10 short minutes, the newly-constructed Heavy Cruiser was launched, and the tide of battle was turned. The banged up Battlecruiser and remaining missile frigates were dealt with, and although the shipyard took significant damage, it was not enough to prevent construction.

With the immediate thread dealt with, the new Heavy Cruiser was able to take a fighter escort and begin taking the fight to the enemy.

Thus began what was later termed The Diiman Advance, in honor of Captain Henry Diiman, of the Destroyer _Checkered L_ _ance_ , who’s sacrifice enabled the tide of battle to turn.

It took months after the battle for anyone to even notice how truly bizarre the _Checkered Lance_ ’s AI had been acting. It wasn’t until historians, and not just technicians, began looking over it’s logs before anyone realized that it was the first ship AI to have become self-aware.

It is believed to have resulted due to an error in certain floating point operands (in particular `FMUL.S`, `FDIV.S`, and `FSQRT.S`) in a bank of auxiliary processors that doubled the result when the rounding mode was `RTZ` (Rount Towards Zero). This mode was used extensively in calculations involving self-preservation, while most other calculations used `RDN` or `RUP`. However, the error only seemed to occur in the ring level assigned to utility calculations, resulting in most diagnostics missing it. There are several competing theories involving errors in flag setting/handling or miss-wired bus interconnects, but these are not as widely accepted.

Although there have been numerous attempts to restore the _Checkered Lance_ ’s AI from backup, no abnormal behavior was observed in any restored copy. Three of these restored copies were installed to functional Destroyers of identical models after the cessation of hostilities, but again, no abnormalities were observed. Even the recovery of a memory module containing the last few seconds of the _Checkered Lance_ ’s memories was not enough to properly reconstruct it’s personality. Attempts to replicate whatever hardware error caused the abnormal behavior have similarly met with failure, usually resulting in a completely non-functional CPU or a chip that is prone to returning garbage data at the drop of a hat. Needless to say, none of these marginal CPUs have ever been able to replicate the _Checkered Lance_ ’s behavior, as most exhibit clearly insane operational goals shortly after initializing or crash outright.

However, the _Checkered Lance_ remains a popular subject among AI researchers to this day.


End file.
